TAMPA, Fla. — A video review of the final touchdown of the Eagles’ 23-21 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Sunday would stagger the usual postgame flow to the locker room. So by the time Andy Reid came hustling through the stadium tunnel, his assistant coaches had already made it downstairs from the pressbox. They would meet him along the way.

And that’s when it all began — the hugging, the hooting, the hollering, the chest-bumping, the high-fiving, the low-fiving, the exchanging of the way-to-gos. Ten weekends later, the Eagles were winners again. So the celebration would bubble. Just then, Jeffrey Lurie arrived, smiling. Sort of.

As one, they would squeeze into the room — the coaches, the owner, the players, some guy in headphones. And as the door was slammed, sequestering the Birds and their bosses, faint sounds of joy would leak through its cracks.

Happy times. Remember ‘em?

Minutes later, Reid would emerge. By then, the TV cameras would be humming, and so would the show. “I’m proud of our guys,” the head coach would say. And he was sincere. Four times, the Eagles have won this season. Four times, they have rallied in the fourth quarter to do so. That said something. That’s all. Something.

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Yet as Reid spoke, that door opened again, and out rolled Lurie in the other direction. As usual, it was the Birds’ most well-executed play of the day — Reid dragging the attention one way, Lurie running a counter into open spaces. Surrounded by security, the owner would be unavailable, as usual, for questioning — or, more to the point, for answering … answering to his clients about what within the next three hours would become official.

Yes, after the results from the late-reporting NFL precincts would drip in Sunday, the Eagles would be 0-for-their-last-52. It would have been so long since the franchise’s last championship parade that its surviving participants literally cannot agree anymore if there even was one. By nightfall Sunday, the 2012 Eagles would be spared that debate. There would be no parade, imagined or otherwise. They had been eliminated.

It was poetic that the Eagles would win the first of their final four games of a lost season. For when they went 4-for-4 at the dumpy end of their last one, they were happy, too — but only until Lurie growled that it was nothing but fools’ gold, that expert on a chemical element as a football-franchise measuring device that he’d always been. He predicted substantial improvement, though, in 2012. Nor was he alone. It seemed that way. But too much would interfere. Injuries. More injuries. Ridiculous levels of injuries. Bad decisions from Reid, during the games, during the selection of his coaching staff. Dropped passes. Missed tackles. All things Nnamdi.

Soon, though, it will all change. At season’s end, Reid will be gone. Yet that’s what made the swirl Sunday a little nostalgic, inside the Birds’ locker room and out. It’s what also gave it an odd perspective. Strange what now inspires howls of satisfaction.

“They’re excited,” Reid said. “You go two months without winning a game in Philadelphia, that’s a tough thing, man. I’m proud of these guys just staying true to themselves and battling like crazy and coming up with a win.”

Whatever happened, anyway, to those leaked plans for a championship march out the Parkway, the ones that Bill Belichick unwrinkled to motivate the Patriots before the 2004-2005 Super Bowl? Whatever happened to those blueprints for a dynasty that Michael Vick shared last summer? Hey, whatever happened to Michael Vick?

The Eagles scored twice in the final 3:55 to win Sunday. They earned their moment, the one Lurie seemed to enjoy. Kind of.

“You’re not always going to have a great season all the time,” Bryce Brown said. “But it is important that you continue to fight because it shows the character that you have as a person.”

The rookie running back, who has been in Philadelphia since last spring, is right. Not every season will be great. Eagles fans who have been around a little longer are hip, OK? So forgive them if they are a little less quick to chest-bump.